Two companies in the AI ecosystem have delayed their IPOs, the latest sign that investor appetite for the trade is uneven at best. SoftBank’s energy business and nuclear company Holtec put off their listings after investors balked, The New York Times reported. At the same time, SoftBank’s junk-bond offering, which will fund its investment in OpenAI, appears to have healthy demand.
The first-order AI trades — frontier labs and chipmakers — are holding up, but a fragility is emerging further down the chain among smaller deals. That’s a bad sign for private-equity firms sitting on $3.8 trillion of unsold companies, Thoma Bravo’s Orlando Bravo told Semafor’s Compound Interest this week. (Stay tuned: we’ll be bringing that episode to you when we return from hiatus early next month.)
“Look at this pipeline: SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, maybe Databricks, these monster companies” heading toward IPOs will “crowd out” smaller offerings, Bravo said. “It’s not a capital issue, it’s a time issue. Who’s going to pay attention to this stuff when they have to make big decisions on this enormous capital?”